Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn't particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.

Rule one in Linux code land: don't believe anything Kroah Hartman says. I'm in full agreement with you on devfs. I used it, I liked it, I adapted a few drivers to use it, and followed the saga around it closely, essentially Greg "Arsehole" KH drove the devfs maintainer away by being a complete ass. Udev is the dumbest idea ever, why have a userspace daemon manage something that originates in kernel space in the first place? Oh, and as for your major/minor numbers, have an ls -l on your /dev... yep, device nodes still have them. At least most distros are smart enough to put udev's tree on a ram disk, but this is a cludgy workaround that shouldn't be necessary. Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X... and just about every other UNIX out there has used a devfs for years. Only in Linux land could an inferior idea displace a superior one because of loud voices.

Rule one in Linux code land: don't believe anything Kroah Hartman says. I'm in full agreement with you on devfs. I used it, I liked it, I adapted a few drivers to use it, and followed the saga around it closely, essentially Greg "Arsehole" KH drove the devfs maintainer away by being a complete ass.

I'm sure you've read about Greg defending udev, but here it is anyway:

Hmmm. I think you're right. It wasn't a crazy off the wall argument he posted. He actually posted real valid answers as to why udev was a better choice. Is it? I don't know. OSX seems to be fine without it, but I'm sure OSX has some form of userland daemon doing the same thing udev does now, Maybe OSX doesn't need to do it because of the limited device compatibility? Either way, interesting read. Thanks!

Rule one in Linux code land: don't believe anything Kroah Hartman says. I'm in full agreement with you on devfs. I used it, I liked it, I adapted a few drivers to use it, and followed the saga around it closely, essentially Greg "Arsehole" KH drove the devfs maintainer away by being a complete ass. Udev is the dumbest idea ever, why have a userspace daemon manage something that originates in kernel space in the first place? Oh, and as for your major/minor numbers, have an ls -l on your /dev... yep, device nodes still have them. At least most distros are smart enough to put udev's tree on a ram disk, but this is a cludgy workaround that shouldn't be necessary. Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X... and just about every other UNIX out there has used a devfs for years. Only in Linux land could an inferior idea displace a superior one because of loud voices.

That was indeed a major FAIL. I knew that major and minor number still exist. What I meant is now they don't mean anything anymore, they're just a pool of numbers that are not bound to any specific driver.

These days it looks like distros are trying to make their boot times shorter. I wonder if they're going to open up the devfs bag again.

I think what shocked me most when I had to switch to udev was how much it slowed down booting — Even with a tmpfs. I told myself: "oh well, maybe it'll improve over time". It didn't.

My ethernet card jumps to eth2 instead of eth0 for no good reason once in a while. Which pisses me off because I've got to go edit /etc/udev/rules.d/blabla and then modprobe -r driver ; modprobe driver. No such problem with devfs. Fortunately I don't reboot often.